How to make git describe use semver compatible tags only

user_586229 0
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I want my git describe invocation to use only refs that conform to semantic versioning. To keep it simple, for now, I do not care about other options (like annotated tags only, branches, candidates, ...).

Example:

I have tagged an early/old commit with 1.1.1 (semver compatible), a more recent commit with my-software-2.2.2, and an even newer one with some-random-tag. I want my git describe invocation to only consider the 1.1.1 tag.

The main difficulty here, seems to be that the way to limit the tags by their name is based on globs, not regex.

git-describe semantic-versioning glob git
2 Answers

The best option I found so far:

git describe \
    --match='[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*' \
    --exclude='*[^0-9.]*'

Because the --match flag only supports primitive globs, not full regex, this check only considers very simple semver's of the form integer-dot-integer-dot-integer, disregarding other valid ones, like:

  • 2.0.0-rc.2
  • 2.0.0-rc.1
  • 1.0.0-beta
  • 1.0.0-alpha+001
  • 1.0.0+20130313144700
  • 1.0.0-beta+exp.sha.5114f85
  • 1.0.0+21AF26D3—-117B344092BD
user_5862290

An other option is to use the (core git independent) Go tool: git-describe-semver.

sample usage:

cd my-git-directory
docker pull ghcr.io/choffmeister/git-describe-semver:latest
docker run --rm -v $PWD:/workdir ghcr.io/choffmeister/git-describe-semver:latest
user_5862290
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